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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think this is about nit picking some small detail that causes them to fail a quality/belief checklist. It’s not like finding out your hero picks his nose or doesn’t like chocolate ice cream. When someone goes mask-off as MAGA, they are revealing fundamental core beliefs and values that totally flip the kind of person you might have thought they were.

I have friends and family who I never thought had a hateful, cruel, or belligerent bone in their bodies, suddenly start acting like totally different people, in the span of a few years. This isn’t me holding them to some purity checklist!

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"Good People" suddenly going all in on racist rants and hard-core misogyny is never going to stop being disturbing.

Some of them taught me how to behave!? Did they just not believe any of those things?

MAGA is a horrifying movement.

It's an object lesson on how certain historical things happened. We go, oh no how could those people have all been inhuman monsters? If only we understood what made them like that.

And the monkey's paw curls…

Agreed. Additionally, when someone says something latently bigoted or hateful, it's easy to just let it slide because we all have our failings and societal progress is slow. Whereas maggotry is about openly embracing those failings, taking on additional types of failings from other people, and then socially validating it all as a purported political movement. But the only real thing tying it together is frustration with the world culminating in lashing out, which is why when they get into power there are no actual constructive policies in any political framework [0]. (apart from lining the preachers' pockets of course, and now apparently a holy war)

nit: I wouldn't call it "mask off" though, as if it's been there the whole time. I'd say it's more like there is tiny a kernel of that (and let's be honest, who doesn't have this in some form or another?), combined with a lack of willpower and critical thinking, that causes them into give in to the siren song of easy answers from mass-personalized propaganda.

[0] ancap and religious fundamentalism are the only frameworks I've been able to find that fit the maggot movement, and they're not particularly constructive.

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